Assessment of Various Film Cooling Configurations Including Shaped and Compound Angle Holes Based on Large Scale Experiments

Author(s):  
J. Dittmar ◽  
A. Schulz ◽  
S. Wittig

The demand of improved thermal efficiency and high power output of modern gas turbine engines leads to extremely high turbine inlet temperatures and pressure ratios. Sophisticated cooling schemes including film cooling are widely used to protect vanes and blades from failure and to achieve high component life-times. Besides standard cylindrical cooling hole geometry, shaped injection holes are used in modern film cooling applications in order to improve cooling performance and to reduce the necessary cooling air flow. However, complex hole shapes may lead to manufacturing constraints and high costs. This paper evaluates some film cooling injection geometry with different complexity. The comparison is based on measurements of the adiabatic film cooling effectiveness and the heat transfer coefficient downstream of the injection location. In total, 4 different film cooling hole configurations are investigated: A single row of fanshaped holes with and without a compound injection angle, a double row of cylindrical holes and a double row of discrete slots, both in staggered arrangement. All holes are inclined 45° with respect to the model’s surface. During the measurements, the influence of coolant blowing ratio is determined. Additionally, the influence of cooling air feeding direction into the fanshaped holes with the compound injection angle is investigated. An infrared thermography measurement system is used for highly resolved mappings of the model’s surface temperature. Accurate local temperature data is achieved by an In-Situ calibration procedure with the help of single thermocouples embedded in the test plate. A subsequent finite elements heat conduction analysis takes three-dimensional heat fluxes inside the test plate into account.

2003 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Dittmar ◽  
A. Schulz ◽  
S. Wittig

The demand of improved thermal efficiency and high power output of modern gas turbine engines leads to extremely high turbine inlet temperatures and pressure ratios. Sophisticated cooling schemes including film cooling are widely used to protect vanes and blades from failure and to achieve high component lifetimes. Besides standard cylindrical cooling hole geometry, shaped injection holes are used in modern film cooling applications in order to improve cooling performance and to reduce the necessary cooling air flow. However, complex hole shapes may lead to manufacturing constraints and high costs. This paper evaluates some film-cooling injection geometry with different complexity. The comparison is based on measurements of the adiabatic film-cooling effectiveness and the heat transfer coefficient downstream of the injection location. In total, four different film-cooling hole configurations are investigated: a single row of fanshaped holes with and without a compound injection angle, a double row of cylindrical holes and a double row of discrete slots both in staggered arrangement. All holes are inclined 45 deg with respect to the model’s surface. During the measurements, the influence of coolant blowing ratio is determined. Additionally, the influence of cooling air feeding direction into the fanshaped holes with the compound injection angle is investigated. An infrared thermography measurement system is used for highly resolved mappings of the model’s surface temperature. Accurate local temperature data is achieved by an in-situ calibration procedure with the help of single thermocouples embedded in the test plate. A subsequent finite elements heat conduction analysis takes three-dimensional heat fluxes inside the test plate into account.


Author(s):  
Rui Zhu ◽  
Gongnan Xie ◽  
Terrence W. Simon

Secondary holes to a main film cooling hole are used to improve film cooling performance by creating anti-kidney vortices. The effects of injection angle of the secondary holes on both film cooling effectiveness and surrounding thermal and flow fields are investigated in this numerical study. Two kinds of primary hole shapes are adopted. One is a cylindrical hole, the other is a horn-shaped hole which is designed from a cylindrical hole by expanding the hole in the transverse direction to double the hole size at the exit. Two smaller cylindrical holes, the secondary holes, are located symmetrically about the centerline and downstream of the primary hole. Three compound injection angles (α = 30°, 45° and 60°, β = 30°) of the secondary holes are analyzed while the injection angle of the primary hole is kept at 45°. Cases with various blowing ratios are computed. It is shown from the simulation that cooling effectiveness of secondary holes with a horn-shaped primary hole is better than that with a cylindrical primary hole, especially at high blowing ratios. With a cylindrical primary hole, increasing inclination angle of the secondary holes provides better cooling effectiveness because the anti-kidney vortices created by shallow secondary holes cannot counteract the kidney vortex pairs adequately, enhancing mixing of main flow and coolant. For secondary holes with a horn-shaped primary hole, large secondary hole inclination angles provide better cooling performance at low blowing ratios; but, at high blowing ratios, secondary holes with small inclination angles are more effective, as the film coverage becomes wider in the downstream area.


Author(s):  
Shubham Agarwal ◽  
Laurent Gicquel ◽  
Florent Duchaine ◽  
Nicolas Odier ◽  
Jérôme Dombard

Abstract Film cooling is a common technique to manage turbine vane and blade thermal environment. Optimizing its cooling efficiency is furthermore an active research topic which goes in hand with a strong knowledge of the flow associated with a cooling hole. The following paper aims at developing deeper understanding of the flow physics associated with a standard cooling hole and helping guide future cooling optimization strategies. For this purpose, Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of the 7-7-7 fan-shaped cooling hole [1] is performed and the flow inside the cooling hole is studied and discussed. Use of mathematical techniques such as the Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) and Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) is done to quantitatively access the flow modal structure inside the hole based on the LES unsteady predictions. Using these techniques, distinct vortex features inside the cooling hole are captured. These features mainly coincide with the roll-up of the internal shear layer formed at the interface of the separation region at the hole inlet. The topology of these vortex features is discussed in detail and it is also shown how the expansion of the cross-section in case of shaped holes aids in breaking down these vortices. Indeed upon escaping, these large scale features are known to not be always beneficial to film cooling effectiveness.


1986 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. O. Demuren ◽  
W. Rodi ◽  
B. Scho¨nung

The present paper describes three-dimensional calculations of film cooling by injection from a single row of holes. A systematic study of the influence of different parameters on the cooling effectiveness has been carried out. Twenty-seven test cases have been calculated, varying the injection angle (α = 10/45/90 deg), the relative spacing (s/D = 1.5/3/5) and the blowing rate (M = 0.5/1/2) for the same mainstream conditions. The governing three-dimensional equations are solved by a finite volume method. The turbulent stresses and heat fluxes are obtained from a k–ε model modified to account for nonisotropic eddy viscosities and diffusivities. Examples of predicted velocity and temperature distributions are presented and compared with available experimental data. For all the test cases, the laterally averaged cooling effectiveness is given. On the whole, the agreement with experiments is fairly good, even though there are discrepancies about details in some of the cases. The influence of the individual parameters on the film cooling effectiveness is predicted correctly in all cases. This influence is discussed in some detail and the parameter combination with the best overall cooling performance is identified.


Author(s):  
Ki-Don Lee ◽  
Kwang-Yong Kim

Shape optimization of a laidback fan-shaped film-cooling hole has been performed by surrogate-based optimization techniques using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes analysis. Spatially-averaged film-cooling effectiveness has been maximized for the optimization. The injection angle of the hole, the lateral expansion angle of the diffuser, the forward expansion angle of the hole, and the ratio of the length to the diameter of the hole are chosen as design variables, and thirty-five experimental points within design space are selected by Latin hypercube sampling. Basic surrogate models, such as second-order polynomial response approximation (RSA), Kriging meta-modeling technique, radial basis neural network (RBNN), are constructed using the analysis results, and the PBA model is composed from these basic surrogate models with the weights being calculated for each basic surrogate. The optimal points are searched from the above constructed surrogates by sequential programming (SQP). It is shown that use of multiple surrogates increases the robustness in prediction of better design with minimum computational cost.


Author(s):  
Matthew N. Fuqua ◽  
James L. Rutledge

Abstract The classical method of superposition has been used for several decades to provide an estimate of the adiabatic effectiveness for multiple sets of already well-characterized film cooling hole rows. In this way, design work is aided by classical superposition theory prior to higher fidelity experiments or simulations that would account for fluid dynamic interaction for which superposition cannot account. In the present work, we consider the additive effects of multiple rows of coolant holes, but now also with coolant issuing at different temperatures. There are a number of ways that coolant may issue from different cooling hole rows at different temperatures, one of which is simply the necessarily different internal channels through which the coolant must pass. The film cooling effectiveness is investigated for double rows of cooling holes wherein the two rows have different coolant temperatures. A double row consisting of an upstream slot and a downstream row of 7-7-7 cooling holes were first evaluated with a single coolant temperature to demonstrate that classical superposition theory applies well to the present configuration. Superposition theory is then extended to the context of multiple coolant temperatures and a new non-dimensional parameter is identified, which governs cooling performance. The theory is experimentally evaluated by independently varying the coolant temperatures of the two rows. Circumstances are identified in which a second row of cooling holes may be detrimental to cooling performance.


Author(s):  
Kenichiro Takeishi ◽  
Yutaka Oda ◽  
Shinpei Kondo

This paper describes an experimental study on the film cooling effectiveness of circular and fan-shaped film cooling holes with a swirling film coolant injected through a flat plate and the endwall of a high-loaded first nozzle. The experiments were conducted using a flat plate wind tunnel and a two-dimensional vane cascade, which is designed based on the first-stage vane of an Energy Efficient Engine (E3) studied under a NASA project. The film cooling effectiveness on a flat plate wind tunnel and the endwall of the enlarged first nozzle of the E3 turbine was measured using pressure sensitive paint (PSP) techniques. The experimental results indicate that the film cooling effectiveness of a circular hole improved by increasing the angle θ of two impinging jets inside the cavity, which are used both for cooling the internal wall and generating a swirling motion in the film coolant. In contrast, it was found that there exist optimal jet angles of θ = 20° for a circular film cooling hole, θ = 5–10° for a flat plate wind tunnel test, and θ = 15° for the cascade test conducted using a fan-shaped film cooling hole. Thus the new film cooling method using swirling cooling air has been demonstrated to maintain high film cooling effectiveness even under such a complicated flow field.


Author(s):  
Jong S. Liu ◽  
Malak F. Malak ◽  
Luis A. Tapia ◽  
Daniel C. Crites ◽  
Dhinagaran Ramachandran ◽  
...  

Gas Turbine Engines operate at temperatures higher than current material temperature limits. This necessitates cooling the metal through internal or external means and/ or protecting the metal with coatings that have higher material limits. Film cooling is one of the major technologies allowing today’s gas turbines to operate at extremely high turbine inlet temperatures, consequently higher power density, and extend the cooled components life. Film cooling is a technique where a coolant is blown over the surface exposed to hot gas and a film of low temperature gas is maintained that protects the metal surface from the hot gas. The application of effective film-cooling techniques provides the first and best line of defense for hot gas path surfaces against the onslaught of extreme heat fluxes, serving to directly reduce the incident convective heat flux on the surface. The effectiveness of film cooling methods depends on the blowing ratio, shape of the cooling holes, and geometrical parameters such as the area ratio and diffusion angle. Film cooling is performed almost exclusively through the use of discrete holes. The holes can be of round or other shaped. A detailed study of the literature shows that the fan shaped has higher effectiveness when compared to other shapes. In this study a number of cooling hole shapes are evaluated numerically using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool ANSYS-CFX-11.0 with the objective of improving cooling effectiveness under a favorable pressure gradient main flow. In order to delineate the effects of shape from that of diffusion, a constant area ratio is assumed first. In the next set of analyses the effect of hole exit diffusion is considered. Results are presented in terms of surface temperatures and adiabatic effectiveness at three different blowing ratios for the different film cooling hole shapes analyzed. Comparison is made with reference to the fan shaped film cooling hole with forward and lateral angles of 10/10/10 degree respectively. Hole shapes that show improvement over the fan shaped hole are identified and optimized.


Author(s):  
John C. P. W. Ling ◽  
Peter T. Ireland ◽  
Lynne Tumer

Concern for the environment has led to world-wide emissions legislation. Under such legislation, land based gas turbines in particular are required to meet stringent emissions levels of NOx and CO. In response, Rolls-Royce has designed and developed a retro fit dry low emission (DLE) module for the industrial RB211 aero-derivative engine. The DLE combustion system achieves low emissions through the use of staged premixed lean burn combustion. The paper reports detailed measurements of heat transfer coefficient and film cooling effectiveness for full coverage film cooling systems suitable for cooling the transition section between the combustor and the nozzle guide vanes. The experiments were performed at large scale using the transient liquid crystal method of measuring heat transfer. The film cooling data are unusual since the film injection angle is 20°. Extensive arrays with hole spacings of 16d and 10d have been investigated with air and with CO2 as the coolant. The latter tests achieved engine representative film to free-stream density ratios. The paper discusses in detail the experimental strategy and compares the data to results from the literature.


Author(s):  
Holger Werschnik ◽  
Jonathan Hilgert ◽  
Martin Bruschewski ◽  
Heinz-Peter Schiffer

The Large Scale Turbine Rig (LSTR) at Technische Universit ät Darmstadt, Germany is used to examine the aerothermal interaction of combustor exit flow conditions on the subsequent turbine stage. The rig resembles a high pressure turbine and is scaled to low Mach number conditions. A baseline configuration with axial, low-turbulent inflow and an aerodynamic inflow condition of a state-of-the-art lean combustor is modeled by the means of swirl generators, whose clocking position towards the nozzle guide vane’s leading edge can be varied. A hub side coolant injection consisting of a double-row of cylindrical holes is implemented to examine the impact on endwall cooling. This paper is directed to study the effect of swirling inflow on heat transfer and film cooling effectiveness on the hub side endwall. Nusselt numbers are calculated using infrared thermography and the auxiliary wall method. This method allows for a high spatial resolution and in addition also yields adiabatic wall temperature data within the same measurement using a superposition approach. Aerodynamic measurements and numerical simulations complement the examination. The results for the baseline case show Nusselt numbers to increase significantly with higher coolant mass flux rates for the whole endwall area. With swirling inflow, in general, a decrease of film cooling effectiveness and an increase of Nusselt numbers is observed for identical mass flux rates in comparison to the baseline case. The difference varies depending on clocking position.


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